Seoul mulls asking Japan for talks over wartime sex slavery

South Korea is considering calling on Japan again for talks on the issue of compensating elderly local women forced to serve in front-line Japanese brothels during World War II, a Seoul official said Thursday.

Up to 200,000 women, including many Koreans, were coerced into sex slavery for the Japanese army during the war, when the Korean Peninsula was a Japanese colony, according to historians.

The official said the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is prepared to send an official letter to urge Japan to come to the negotiating table and discuss whether reparations are still due for its sexual enslavement of South Koreans over half a century ago.

“We are considering various ways, including whether to actually send the letter,” the source said, indicating that the ministry is making efforts to resolve the sexual enslavement issue.

The ministry previously dispatched two similar letters to Japan, both in 2011, in a bid to use diplomatic channels to help the former sexually enslaved women, euphemistically called “comfort women,” receive their demands of compensation and an official apology. Both of the letters went unanswered.

“The ministry is very regretful about Japan showing no response to South Korea‘s such calls,” ministry spokeswoman Han Hye-jin said in a briefing. “We urge again Japan to come up with a speedy response.”

There are only 56 victims of the sexual enslavement alive now and they are running out of time, as many of them have died of old age, Han said.

The ministry will determine when to send the letter after examining further development in Seoul-Tokyo relations, she said.

A group of former comfort women, who are now mostly in their 80s, and their supporters have been strongly demanding financial compensation and an official apology from Japan for enslaving the women to work in battlefield brothels during Japan’s World War II fighting.

Japan has consistently denied its liability for the issue, claiming that the 1965 treaty between the two countries cleared it of any further responsibility. Under the treaty, the two countries established diplomatic ties and agreed to absolve Japan of its wrongdoings against South Korean individuals who suffered and were enslaved under Japan‘s colonial rule from 1910-45.

In a landmark case, South Korea’s Constitutional Court ruled in August 2011 that the foreign ministry‘s inaction in dealing with the comfort women compensation issue is unconstitutional and infringes upon the victims’ fundamental rights. (Yonhap News)